Breathing and Your New Exercise Routine

Breathing and Your New Exercise Routine

New Year, New Exercise Resolutions

It’s a new year, and people all over the country are setting new goals to get in shape, to stay healthy, and to exercise more. It’s not uncommon to review the year and analyze your health and wellness habits, and then realize you need to change certain aspects of how you eat and how you exercise. According to a Nielsen survey in 2015, the top two resolutions made in the United States were to stay healthy and fit, and to lose weight. In other words, exercise and health are two things Americans desire to have more of in their day-to-day lives. As you stick to your resolutions this year and exercise more, take the time to make sure you’re correctly doing one of the most important foundational functions of exercise—breathing.

Importance of Breathing During Exercise

Breathing properly while exercising can help increase athletic performance, decrease stress, and lower blood pressure. A regular, deliberate breathing pattern will help fuel the muscles with oxygen, which is needed to sustain strenuous exercise. Some people tend to hold their breath while exercising—that extra breath inside gives a temporary boost to core strength, which helps complete the task at hand. However, this can lead to harmful situations, such as hernias and muscle cramps.

Personal trainers and instructors of all types of exercise encourage their trainees to breathe on a regular basis. Yoga, for one, is an exercise that focuses highly on breathing throughout the entire process—not only for the physical effect it has on the body during the routine, but for the emotional impact it has in letting go of stress. While weight lifting, a personal trainer will encourage a specific breathing pattern—inhale as you let the weights fall, and exhale as you lift. The same goes for many sports and exercises; following a pattern of correct breathing will help improve performance and prevent injury. Many trainers now even advocate for breathing through the nose to increase oxygen uptake in the muscles.

Importance of Open Airways

Proper breathing includes keeping your airways open. If you have clogged sinuses or suffer from congestion, breathing will naturally be more difficult, and therefore the benefits of proper breathing will be out of reach. Open airways will help sustain your heath and put you on the path to fulfilling your resolutions. Studies have shown that nasal breathing in particular helps to calm and focus the mind and body, which leads to better performance. Using Xlear Saline Nasal Spray with xylitol to keep the nasal passage clear is an excellent way to attain this heightened performance.

What to Do When You’re Sick

Exercise is not only an excellent way of getting fit, it can actually help you get better from many common sicknesses. Some physicians actually recommend working up a sweat when you’re feeling under the weather since it performs the same function as a fever. Using Xlear Nasal Spray while sick with a cold or waylaid by allergies can help clear your sinuses and give you the benefits of proper breathing for your exercise routine. If you have more severe symptoms, however, doctors say it’s best to rest. If this is the case, don’t let the severity of your sickness get you down–rinse your sinuses with the Xlear Sinus Rinse and get back to the gym when you’re healthy again. Getting sick often derails a perfectly good exercise routine—don’t let it ruin yours.

As you work towards your new goals (and set new ones throughout the year) remember to keep your airways clean, stay healthy, and breathe properly during exercise for an improved workout.

What is Xylitol?

Pure xylitol is a white crystalline substance that looks and tastes like sugar. It’s not an artificial sweetener, but a natural sugar alcohol found in many fruits and vegetables and produced in small amounts by the human body. Xylitol has been researched for over 40 years, resulting in thousands of studies confirming its effectiveness and safety.